Diarmuid Corry has written poems and stories all his life as a pastime. In 1990 he was paralyzed in a road traffic accident and now uses a wheelchair. While he sometimes writes directly about the experience of disability, more often the experience informs his work more generally as an awareness of the fragility of life and the thin line between health and non-health. He has no previously published works other than a poem in Young Irish Writing in the Irish Press circa 1980 (give or take a year).
Graveyard Requiem
The rain came down in sheets,
Gravestone grey,
As bitter as the loss of her
Still felt, her absence present
at each of life’s occasions.
Three ladies bowed in drenching sorrow
A requiem mass sung, sung again,
ghosts mourning in the morning
barely visible. A sombre grave listens.
And later in a warm cafe
Coffee, buns and small talk
To restitch the threads of day to day.
When the Stars go Out
One by one they extinguish;
The stars of our firmament,
The constellations guiding our souls,
Our dreams enwrapped in their web of light.
One by one they extinguish
And I begin to forget who we once were
Forget the silk threads that bound us
The bouquets of tragedy with their perfume of sorrow.
And when we lie together beneath the starless void
Our fingers entwined in stillness and in hope.
When there is nothing left but the echoes of our touch
I will remember only Love and her ethereal light.
Mercy
A tide so far out that
We are scandalised by the beach
languidly stretching naked
Tan flesh barely hidden
By the rivulets and pools left behind by
A tide so far out that
We cannot see the sea
And can thread our way through
The rivulets and pools and think
That this is all there is to life
Just rivulets and pools and an immodest beach
That carries the recent history of our day
The criss and the cross of dogs and dog walkers
And families and lovers and the lonely old
Whose sun has almost set into
A tide so far out that
We cannot see the threat
The sudden flow the turn the rush of wave
That dooms our days our tracks
Our histories our setting suns
And washes the scandalous beach clean
As though we were never there
Had never knelt by the rivulets and pools
Beseeching an indifferent god for mercy.
When I have Dined with Death
When I have dined with Death
And danced with her to Destiny
And spun across the ballroom floor
Wearing cerements and a floral wreath
I will release the love you’ve given me
And the laughter, joy and hope and then
Scatter them on fertile soil to grow
That you may harvest them again
And your tears may nourish them my love
But grief must be a passing thing
For you have a life to live, a dance to dance
And the orchestra is playing again
And I’ll be there yes, I’ll be there
Between the drumstick and the drum
Between the violin string and horsehair bow
Hear me laugh, and hearing that dance on my love,
Dance On
The Galway Review 